The natural conclusion from 2 Chronicles 36:7, 2 Chronicles 36:8, compared with Jeremiah 36:30, is that Jehoiakim was bound in order to be carried to Babylon, but was put to death by Nebuchadnezzar instead. This is very much the idea of what happened according to Josephus. How was it that the author of Daniel started with the beginning of the reign of Jehoiakim? In the light of Chronicles this made his reign really only three years, but Chronicles and Kings make his reign eleven years. He knew the Book of Jeremiah intimately: how did he not know that the fourth year of Jehoiakim coincided with the first of Nebuchadnezzar? He knew the Book of Kings, he knew the various chronological notes in it; how could he conceivably be ignorant, to the extent Professor Bevan imagines him to be, of what naturally follows from these notes? There are only two suppositions—that he knew a solution of the apparent contradiction, and took it for granted that everybody else knew it also—a mood of mind more natural to a contemporary of the events he is narrating, than to a fatsarius writing centuries after; or these chronological notes were not in the text of these books when he wrote, in which case they are late interpolations, and therefore valueless. Professor Bevan cannot be permitted to invalidate proofs of the authenticity of Daniel drawn from the accuracy of the statements concerning Babylonian habits, by asserting that these statements might have been deduced from Jeremiah and Kings, and then assail the authenticity of Daniel, because some of its statements differ from Jeremiah. If he had shown Daniel ignorant of one or other of these documents, and, from this, convicted him of incorrectness, the argument would have had weight, but, as it is, his arguments are mutually destructive.
We have thus endeavoured to show that there is no chronological blunder in the verses before us, that the basis on which the assertion is made is in the highest degree doubtful, and that the arguments depend on such minute points, that to lay stress on them proves such an animus as deprives the decision of all the weight that otherwise would be due to the learning of the writer.